Crucifixion Creek

by Barry Maitland

  Harry frowns, wondering if she’s a little mad. ‘Yeah? So?’

  ‘They owned property—three houses—on Mortimer Street, in the Creek.’

  ‘I thought they were from the North Shore somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, that’s where they lived, but they also had these investment properties. And the woman who found them lives in one of those houses, and that’s how I became interested in that strange story.’

  Harry drinks his beer and glances at his watch. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Well, yes. Our local Councillor Potgeiter, who thinks the Shooters Party are a pack of bleeding heart lefties, wants to erect a memorial to Aboriginal reconciliation in the Civic Centre…’

  Harry looks at her.

  ‘…thereby making possible the removal of the memorial in Bidjigal Park in the Creek.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Harry drains his glass. ‘It’ll make an interesting article in your paper, I’m sure. I’ll keep a look-out for it.’ He starts to get to his feet.

  ‘Harry!’ she almost yells, ‘That old couple were murdered!’

  Heads turn. Harry stares at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘That old couple.’ She leans in to him, willing him back into his seat. ‘A couple of months ago they were rich. Then they got tangled up with some finance company who turned them into paupers, in connivance with their son. He’s very cagey about the whole thing.’

  ‘What finance company?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve just got a name, Crosstitch, but I can’t track him down.’ She sees the expression on his face. ‘You’ve heard of him?’

  ‘Kristich,’ he says, and spells it out. ‘Alexander Kristich. Previously Sandi Krstić from the Gold Coast. You’d better tell me the whole story.’

  So she does.

  ‘You went and spoke to the son?’

  ‘Yes. He wouldn’t see me at first, then he changed his mind.’

  ‘How did he explain what had happened to his folks?’

  ‘Dementia. But I don’t believe him. Mrs Bulwer-Knight says there was nothing wrong with them when she last saw them a month ago.’

  Harry has made enquiries about Kelly Pool. He’s picked up the story of her run-in with the Murdoch editor. Now he wonders just how desperate she is for a second chance, a redeeming scoop. How likely she is to find it working for the Bankstown Chronicle.

  ‘Then he threatened me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I think that was the real reason he agreed to see me. He said his lawyer will go for me—and the paper—if we print anything about his parents he doesn’t like.’

  ‘Did he say who his lawyer is?’

  ‘No. So what do you know about this Kristich character?’

  ‘He’s just one of those names that comes across the desk from time to time. An elusive man, from all accounts. You can look him up.’

  He was aware of her searching look. ‘Come on, Harry. There’s more, isn’t there?’

  ‘Kristich’s lawyer is Nathaniel Horn. Heard of him?’

  ‘Of course! I’ve seen him on TV.’

  ‘It’d be interesting to know if he’s also the lawyer for the old couple’s son.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But the odds are he isn’t. The thing is, Kelly, crimes don’t come evenly spread across the city. They come in clusters, and sometimes the clusters just happen. No reason, just coincidence. If you want to start a fire somewhere, what better place than a run-down dump like the Creek? Maybe you read in the Bankstown Chronicle that that’s where the guy who got stabbed nearby had a business.’

  ‘No, we didn’t print that.’

  ‘But you take my point. Coincidences happen all the time in the real world. They don’t necessarily mean anything.’

  Kelly glares at him. ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time it’s enemy action.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  She blushes. ‘Goldfinger.’

  He laughs and gets to his feet.

  ‘But what are you going to do?’ she says.

  ‘Nothing. You haven’t given me any grounds. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to write a story, Harry, and it’d be great if you could help me. If you could find out that the son’s lawyer is Horn, say, I’d write you up as the great detective. It would do you good.’

  No, it really wouldn’t. That’s the last thing it would do. ‘No, Kelly,’ he says. ‘You’re not going to mention my name and you’re not going to contact me again, okay?’

  As he walks back to headquarters he phones Garry Roberts the pathologist. Yes, Garry did the post-mortems on the old couple and yes, he did specifically examine their brains for signs of Alzheimer degeneration.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing,’ says Garry.

  Harry then phones Jenny and asks if she can hack into Justin Waterford’s computer, find out if he knows Kristich or Horn. She says she’ll try.

  When he arrives home there is a small pile of computer printouts on the kitchen table. Since neither Jenny nor her whispering electronic friend has any use for hard copies, he realises they are for him. First he pours two glasses of wine and asks Jenny about her day, and turns the roasting chicken over for her.

  ‘I got into Waterford’s computer all right,’ she says. ‘There’s some copies for you over there.’ He sways back as she points over her shoulder with the knife in her hand, dangerously close to his face. ‘Oops,’ she says. ‘Was that near you? Sorry.’

  He picks up the papers. First some pages from websites referencing Alexander Kristich and Bluereef Financial Services. They are all from a two-day period, four months ago.

  ‘That’s all there was on Kristich,’ she says. ‘Waterford just looked him up that time, then nothing.’

  ‘Right.’ There are more Google searches, this time for Nathaniel Horn, all within the past week, and an exchange of emails with the lawyer’s office, confirming the time of a meeting.

  ‘Not much,’ Jenny says.

  ‘It’s enough. He knows them.’ And he tells her about his meeting with Kelly Pool.

  ‘You didn’t tell her about Greg and Kristich, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s the most important thing, isn’t it? What did he do to Greg, and how can we now protect Nicole?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If I could get into his computer I might find a record of their transactions, and then we could have them looked at by our lawyer.’

  So after dinner she sits down with her little spy and gets to work. Harry sits with her for a while, reading, until he suddenly lurches upright and realises he’s been asleep. She hears his grunt and tells him to go to bed, that she’ll join him soon. But she doesn’t, and when he wakes in the morning the bed beside him is empty, and she’s still in the front room, working.

  ‘I can’t bloody do it,’ she says wearily. ‘He’s got some new NGFW with IPS I’ve never seen before.’

  Harry has n
o idea what that means. ‘You’ve been at it all night?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll get some sleep now and try again later, but I really don’t think I’m going to get anywhere. I also tried getting in through Horn’s computer, but it’s equally well protected.’

  Later, when he gets home, he can tell from her expression that she’s failed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, despairing. ‘It’s hopeless. I can’t do it.’

  ‘What if you had his computer?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, physically here in front of you. Could you get into it then?’

  ‘I…’ She’s staring right at him. ‘I know someone who could probably help me.’

  ‘Okay. So could you bypass the security systems in the Gipps Tower—cameras, locks?’

  ‘What? I don’t know.’

  ‘Why don’t you try?’

  ‘Harry…I don’t want you to do that.’

  ‘Just try.’

  By midnight she’s worked out how to do it. She can give him the master entry code for all the electronic locks in the tower, and can pause the cameras and freeze the images on the monitors in the security centre for a limited period. ‘Thirty minutes, Harry. No more than an hour.’

  ‘Right, I’ll go and get changed.’

  ‘You’re going now?’ She looks terrified. ‘If they catch you you’ll lose your job, everything. You’ll go to jail. It’s not worth it, Harry.’

  He kisses her and she clings to him and finally he has to ease out of her grip. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Jenny closes the front door after him and turns back into the house, feeling sick with foreboding. What if they arrest him? She has to try to block this feeling of helplessness every time he goes off to work, to face who knows what. She hates feeling so vulnerable.

  She climbs the stairs, up past the bedroom floor to the attic room under the roof. Up here where a small window looks out through the branches of the plane tree, it feels like a children’s tree house. This was Harry’s father’s sanctuary, his study, and there is still a faint lingering smell of the small cigars that he liked to smoke when he had to do some serious thinking. It comforts her to come up here. She misses them both, Mary earthy and indomitable, and Danny with that impish sense of humour that used to delight Greg and Nicole’s little girls, filling their house with shrieks and giggles. And Jenny listening to them with an ache in her belly, wanting so much to have children of her own to join in.

  The walls are lined with shelving carrying hundreds of books, box files, diaries and law magazines. Somewhere among them may be the answer to why he and Mary died, if Harry is right in his belief that their deaths were deliberate. In the hours he’s spent searching the documents he’s come up with a long list of possible lethal motives. Danny Belltree was involved in a lot of cases during his long legal career.

  Jenny sits in his old office chair and runs her fingers over his smooth cedar table top. By the time she was released from hospital after the crash, Harry had moved back into his parents’ house. He brought her here, and they have been here ever since. It’s a much nicer home than the ugly little flat in Bondi, but still, she doesn’t know if it was a good idea. Surely the constant presence of his parents in every room fuels his obsession to explain their deaths—when in truth, as the coroner decided, there may not be an explanation to find.

  When she returned from the hospital and first began to learn how to live a blind life, she started with this house. She learned from painful experience its traps and dangers for the unsighted. And she trained her memory and inner eye to reconstruct its geometry, its details. She felt the dimensions and texture of each piece of furniture, each picture on the walls, and built their images in her mind. Over there, for example, in the angle beneath the sloping surface of the roof, is a 1965 photograph of the young Danny and Mary on the Freedom Ride in Moree, protesting for the civil rights of Indigenous Australians. She looks impassioned, pretty and pale. He stands at her side, awkward. Proud. It was through them, doing research work in Danny’s chambers, that Jenny first met Harry. She sometimes wonders if they chose her for him.

  12

  It is now one-forty, the same time that Greg died, which seems auspicious somehow. He finds a parking space in The Rocks and walks back up into the business district with the bag slung on his back. As he approaches the glass cylinder of the Gipps Tower he makes a brief call to Jenny, ‘Ready to go.’ He pulls on latex gloves and walks down the ramp of the tower’s basement to a pedestrian door at the foot, where he taps in the entry code on the keypad. Half expecting nothing to happen, he tries the handle. The door opens silently and he steps inside. Halfway down a bare corridor there’s a door into one of the fire escape stairwells that rise through the building and he begins his climb.

  When he emerges into the lobby of the twenty-third floor there is only low-level emergency lighting. No lights show through the glass doors of the tenants’ offices that he passes to get to Bluereef Financial Services—also in darkness. Again the entry code works. He holds his breath as he opens the door, bracing for an alarm that may be independent of the main tower systems, but there is no sound. He is in a small reception area—a computer on a desk and filing cabinets behind. He opens a door opposite. This looks like the principal’s office—Kristich’s—with a large desk and computer on one side of the room and a conference table and chairs over against the external wall—full-height glass that looks out to the shimmering lights of the CBD. There are no pictures on the wall and the furnishings look generic, as if rented and ready to be abandoned.

  There is another room beyond this one, and the glow of a light through the half-open door. Harry pads silently across the carpet to see. The light comes from a lamp on a low table beside a sofa facing a TV. A private sitting room? There are some men’s magazines and a couple of used glasses. A champagne bottle, Krug. One of the glasses has traces of lipstick.

  He returns to the office and searches the desk drawers, finding nothing of interest. Then out to the reception area, to the filing cabinets, which are locked. It takes him a few minutes to find the keys in the receptionist’s desk, and he begins a search through the files. The first drawer is full of blank forms and letterheads, the second booklets and forms relating to tax and property, the third staff files. The client files start in the fourth drawer. Each file is identified by a number rather than a name, and they are in numerical order, so that he has to open each one in order to identify the client. It takes him some time to discover one for Waterford, and then another for March. He pulls them out, and is about to relock the cabinets when, out of curiosity, he flicks through a few more files and comes upon one with the name ‘Belltree’ scrawled on the front. He freezes, then slowly draws it out, turns the locks and replaces the keys.

  He is in mild shock, his heart thumping. Now the computer. Which one should he take? He decides the one in Kristich’s office is more likely to contain sensitive material, and heads back there. As he steps towards the desk he feels a tightening in his scalp. There’s something—a smell…And as he turns, a voice from behind him.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  The man is a black silhouette against the electric panorama beyond the window. Harry lays the files on the desk at his side as the figure moves to the wall and flips the lights. A short man going fleshy, p
ale hair thinning. Probably no more than forty, wearing a silk dressing gown. Harry recognises him as Alexander Kristich, and the pistol in his hand as a US Army Ruger 1911. Kristich is staring in fascination at the latex gloves on Harry’s hands. His voice sounds a little slurred as he advances on Harry. ‘Hands up. Turn around.’ He waves the heavy pistol at Harry, who wonders if he knows how to use it, if it’s loaded or cocked. He turns and lets Kristich feel his pockets and pat his chest.

  Kristich backs off. ‘Well?’ he demands. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a student, Mr Kristich.’ Harry slowly turns to face him, lowering his arms.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A student of your methods. I want to learn from you.’

  Kristich splutters. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I think you’re an expert at what you do.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Kristich waves him away from the desk, and cautiously flips over the covers of the files. ‘Waterford…March. Why these two?’

  ‘Because they ended up dead. I want to find out how you did that.’

  ‘You’re a cop.’ But he sounds uncertain. ‘Or what? You after a little something for yourself?’

  Harry says nothing, then Kristich’s face clears and he laughs, as if he’s suddenly decided that this is a hilarious situation. ‘You want to learn from me, do you? You want to know what my secret is? Well, I’ll tell you. I’m a student too. I study human weakness, and then I facilitate it. Take those people…’ he waves towards the files, ‘…the Waterfords. Great ambitions, yeah? They want to leave a memorial, a new exhibition room in the State Gallery named after them. Trouble is, it’s going to cost twenty mill, and they only got about ten.’ He shrugs, falsely modest. ‘I told them I could increase their wealth by ten per cent a month. They weren’t sure at first, but I persuaded them to give me a try. The first month they give me half a mill, and after thirty days I give them back five-fifty thou. The second month they give me a mill, and I give ’em one point one. Third month, two mill, and I give them two point two. And the fourth month they give me everything and I take it all. See?’